Y Combinator rejected Wealthsimple's early prototype due to market doubts
Mike Katchen · Mike Katchen, Co-Founder of Wealthsimple | How to Come up with an Idea that Gets Product Market Fit · PMF Show · Apr 17, 2023 · at 8:32
Mike Katchen is the co-founder and CEO of Wealthsimple. He recounts applying to Y Combinator with their initial prototype, SteadyUp, before pivoting the product model.
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“We applied to YC, little known fact about Wealthsimple's history at this stage. Got turned down because they didn't quite believe that anybody wanted what we were trying to build.”
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“You know, companies are roughly twenty billion or so today, which is you know, nothing to sneeze at, but it's not a trillion yet.”
Regulators initially forced Wealthsimple to call every new customer for suitability
“It took us like six months to get the approval, which felt like forever. Maybe it wasn't in a regulatory world, but then even when we got approval, we actually had all these conditions on it where we had to call every single client who signed up to do a suitab…”
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“It took us another, like, six months of showing them the data of, like, how phone calls really didn't change the answer for people, and people really didn't want, young people in particular, like, really didn't want to speak to anybody on the phone. To convinc…”